Armada's End: a Retrospective

As I'm sure most readers of this blog are aware, AMG officially pulled the plug on both Armada and X-Wing. No more development, no more inventory produced, Worlds 2025 will be the last hurrah.

Many Armada players on 6/13/24

If you're looking for a sweet send-off of Armada, I'd recommend this one written by our buddy Biggs. Summer also wrote a good one over at Goonhammer. I know John's cooking up his own eulogy and I'm sure it will be out shortly. I share similar sentiments, although my history with the game and gaming in general is a little different. I've got a few things I'd like to cover in what is likely my final post here, so let's begin, shall we?

My own history with Armada
I played my first game of Armada before it was commercially available. By which I mean I played a demo game at Adepticon which came at me out of nowhere: I had no idea it was even in development. I had a great time piloting my fat heavy VSD around the board (it was a starter box game). When the starter boxes became available, I grabbed one immediately. I stayed with the game from that point through all of the Clone Wars releases, never lapsing and building up my local Chicagoland community with John. This blog itself is an outgrowth of that: early on after we had a good time at the Massing of Sullust "sorry wave 2 is taking forever to get here" tournament (where I fortuitously won my very first Raider) and decided to really commit to Armada as our main game, we had an email chain of all our local players so we could coordinate meet-ups and also so we could teach less experienced players and encourage them to improve and understand the ins and outs better. We found we had to repeat ourselves a fair bit as new players kept arriving and our community kept growing so eventually we decided we'd start up a Star Wars Armada blog to keep everything in one place (back in January of 2017, as I recall). If it happened to help other people, great. Cannot Get Your Ship Out ended up being extremely successful (over 4 million views as of this entry), which still feels great. At this point I figure I've put thousands of hours into playing the game, talking about the game, teaching the game, or writing about the game. I've made a lot of friends through the game that I maintain to this day. You could say it's something I'm passionate about.

I had a pretty good run at various tournaments (winning Adepticon several times before it became the site of Worlds and doing fairly well at Worlds afterwards, check the tournaments index for some reports from 2017-2019) and got into Armada playtesting (look for me and John in the playtester credits starting with wave 8). We always had a good relationship with the guys over at Steel Squadron (Biggs, Shmitty, and Truthiness) so when the Clone Wars releases began alongside a rebooted Armada 1.5, we were all riding high. They asked to join up to keep all our content in one place and we figured with how bright things were looking we'd have plenty to talk about and welcomed the opportunity.

We... uh... well... we were wrong (not about the Steel Squadron guys, they're great). COVID hit and everything came to a halt for a while, Atomic Mass Games took over and ignored Armada, and our communities all kind of evaporated. My Fair Game/Downers Grove community kept shrinking after businesses re-opened and what used to be the Midwest's biggest and most competitive Armada community gradually disappeared. Chicagoland saw the same happen in every store that previously had an Armada group but Games Plus, which became the last bastion for Chicagoland Armada but was not a realistic possibility for me: a two-hour round trip to play Armada on the weekend was just too much time away from my wife and son during our usual family time. Similar stories were shared by many others, including our Steel Strategy friends: they tried to fight the inevitable but not many had regular communities any more (exception made for Truthi but even he didn't play nearly as much as he once did). We've been maintaining the blog since but what was left of the game moved on without us. And now AMG has closed up the Armada shop for good.

I'm disappointed, of course, but my community dried up before AMG dropped the axe so I've had time to come to terms with it. This isn't the first time a game I've played has been discontinued by its publisher either, so I've got some hard-earned experience with what it's like when a game I loved dies off. My history background arises in situations like these, leading me to ask questions like "Why did things happen the way they did and who did them? Could things have gone differently? If so, how?" Answering these questions helps center my own experience and gives me a more realistic outlook on what to expect in the future. Hopefully it does for you too, and that's what I want to discuss in the rest of this post.

The players involved, or "what AMG is and isn't responsible for."
I've seen a lot of complaining about Atomic Mass Games online and frankly I think it's largely justified if perhaps not very well-directed. 

This is the way.

There's not much clarity when it comes to why AMG was given Armada (and X-Wing and Legion) in the first place: it's generally accepted that Asmodee (the company that owns Fantasy Flight Games and AMG and a host of other board gaming companies) decided it wanted just one of its child companies to manage miniature gaming and forced the Star Wars minis games out of FFG's hands and into AMG's hands. There's additional conjecture that AMG didn't even want these other games, but that's a bit uncertain: given the release of Shatterpoint, it seems as though AMG wanted the Star Wars license to make a game it jived with better and having to take over FFG's Star Wars games was the price it had to pay to do so. Asmodee itself has a pretty awful reputation in the gaming world: it's effectively a private equity firm masquerading as a games publishing house. Asmodee buys up gaming companies, hollows them out, and mines their intellectual property to keep cranking out "safe" content that's often reiterations of what worked in the past. Ever notice how FFG slowly went from a vast and exciting board gaming company to "the guys who make Star Wars games and Twilight Imperium?" The reason is Asmodee, and it's the kind of thing they do to every studio they acquire.

It behooves us to take a small detour to talk about what AMG actually is: most of the higher-ups at AMG are refugees from Privateer Press (e.g. Will Shick, Will Pagani, Michael Plummer) who left to create Marvel Crisis Protocol in 2019. Warmachine and Privateer Press are topics John and I are very familiar with, having been Warmachine players through all of Mk2. My brother (who shall remain nameless) competed at a very high level in Warmachine and personally knew a number of the big players involved. Warmachine was, for a good number of years, the most popular miniatures game in the world. This was at a time when Games Workshop was in decline and many players were looking for an alternative to 40K, which was in bad shape. Despite a commanding a dominating position during its second edition, Warmachine was mismanaged pretty badly by Privateer Press and slowly became irrelevant. I'd love to say that it seems like the people who make decisions at AMG learned from their failures at PP but the way they behaved was very familiar to me: AMG was a mysterious black box that made announcements seemingly at random and otherwise responded to outsiders rarely if ever, the little communication we did get was dismissive, game "events" would be announced out of nowhere right before they went into effect and those events were terribly-balanced and generally-ignored by players, and print and play expansions were doled out also with no advance notice and clearly at a lower standard than products that could be purchased. What I'm getting at is: AMG as a company is pretty young but the people in positions of power there have a lot of experience and a bad reputation. It's tempting to forgive AMG's mistakes in handling the Star Wars miniatures games as the kind of errors a rookie company might make but rookies aren't making AMG's decisions: its big decisions are made by people who once were in charge of the world's most popular miniatures game, fumbled it, and then fled the sinking ship when they could. In short, AMG is Privateer Press in disguise.

Given Privateer Press had experience with a ground combat skirmish game (Warmachine/Hordes), it's unsurprising AMG took to Legion more quickly and successfully than the earlier space-based Star Wars minis games. Legion was also younger and had more fresh ground to cover. Everyone was hoping that AMG would get around to seriously considering X-Wing and Armada, but after AMG fired the prior lead developer for FFG minis games, Luke Eddy, a few months into their takeover, it became pretty clear that it was unlikely to happen. They proceeded to mess around with X-Wing seemingly randomly and largely ignore Armada, with the occasional low-effort PDF thrown our way. When they announced Shatterpoint, it was clear that their priority was developing a new game. If they really wanted to take some time to learn Armada (and X-Wing) they could have easily done so using the time and resources they devoted to developing and producing Shatterpoint.

To zoom out a bit, it certainly didn't help that Embracer Group (the company that owns Asmodee), had some serious financial trouble and spun off Asmodee while saddling it with nearly a billion euros in debt just two months before AMG pulled the plug on Armada for good. Whether Asmodee can survive that level of debt is uncertain but it absolutely puts the screws to Asmodee and its subsidiaries (relevant to us, both AMG and FFG) to focus all their efforts on their highest-performing products. Even if we can all agree that Armada was still selling (the hosts of "how do I find X ships to fill out my collection?" posts can attest to that) and making a profit, a company fighting for its life needs to prioritize the greatest return on investment. In short, the time and resources it took to develop, produce, store, and ship all the physical materials for Armada products could go towards other games sold by Asmodee that have better profit margins and/or sell more reliably at higher volume. Therefore, continuing to produce Armada instead of other more valuable products is hurting Asmodee's chances of climbing out of the 900 million euro hole it's stuck in. Welcome to late-stage capitalism! I'm not jazzed about it either.

So with the timeline and some background established, let's get to the fundamental question posed earlier: what is AMG responsible for in all this mess? It's tempting to let our disappointment with how they've treated us and our game become a blanket "these idiots killed Armada," and to some extent that's true. At the very least they neglected Armada and treated the player base with disrespect and dishonesty. In short, AMG are not good people and they don't deserve your business but I'm not sure there's an alternate reality where FFG meaningfully kept Armada alive: had they retained the license to Star Wars minis games somehow, they would've faced the same economic crunch from Asmodee being deeply in debt and Armada had never been FFG's top priority. We were always big enough to merit continuing but never a major revenue stream and the same market logic that killed us off after being mistreated by AMG would've still resulted in our game being put out to pasture by FFG, albeit after receiving what I have to assume would have been better treatment and another wave or two in the years before.

Something that satisfyingly tied off our narrative arc at the very least.

An honest appraisal of Fantasy Flight Games
It's transparently obvious that Armada received better treatment under FFG than it did under AMG, but I want to be clear that it was still a bit of a mixed bag. I'm seeing a fair bit of rose-tinted spectacles about the FFG years but all of the following were things that happened under FFG's stewardship of the game:

• Underwhelming support for the game in its early stages. The core set was released March 2015 with wave one following shortly behind in May. It took until November 26th of 2016 for wave two to arrive, a considerable gap of nearly a year and a half. I personally witnessed the game losing momentum as players grew tired of playing with very limited content and iconic ships like the Imperial Star Destroyer and Home One MC80 took forever to actually reach shelves. A lot of players took a break never to return at this stage.
  
• Waves three and four shipment screw-up. Waves three and four effectively released together. Somewhere in all that mess was an FFG logistics chief trying to explain why wave three was going to be broken up into two waves and wave 4 had an unknown ETA but then wave four actually showed up one week earlier than wave three. It was a mess at the time if you were there.
• Flotillas. Just... flotillas. The damage done to the game by these little ships is difficult to communicate to someone who got in after they were finally errataed into some semblance of balance. Flotilla spam was rampant for years (I recall a German Nationals was won by Tokra running Tarkin, 8+ Gozantis, and a horde of squadrons) and created some of the least fun games of Armada many ever played. The fights about them on the FFG forums were ugly and persistent. It took FFG years to finally rein flotillas in and a number of community members abandoned the game before FFG got around to it.
• In short, very cheap ships with scatter tokens that prevent you from being tabled, provide activations, and can cheaply command 2 Squadrons was a very bad idea.
• Even after the "only two in a 400 point list and they don't prevent tabling" nerf hit flotillas, it was common to see two in most fleets because they were still very good, so players maxed out on the most good thing they could take (to a lesser extent, see how most fleets cap out at their 4 ace squadron limit after 1.5 as well). This only started to shift with the 1.5 rules updates that made activation quantity somewhat less important.
  
• Waves 3/4 began a 5-year period of maximum 134-point squadron list dominance in competitive Armada, largely enabled by flotillas providing cheap squad command muscle power as well as bringing up the activation count and making it much harder to table carrier fleets, which had been weaknesses maximum squad lists had previously. Even after flotillas were nerfed this dominance continued unabated until the 1.5 rules updates helped ships handle squadrons a bit better (Point Defense Ion Cannons helped too).
• Slow nerfs. It took a very long time for FFG to finally agree to rein in other negative elements of the game beyond just flotillas. Demolisher and Rieekan ran amok for a very long time, for example, as did "works from across the board while my fleet flies away" Relay.
  
• Mid-game malaise. Wave 7 was February 2018. We got nothing until the Super Star Destroyer dropped in August 2019, and that was mostly interesting if you both wanted and could afford one (I dropped the $200 but I can totally understand if anyone was reluctant) or played against someone who could (sorry, Rebels, you got nothing at all). We then waited until September 2019 for Rebellion in the Rim and January 2020 for wave 8 to finally arrive, a gap of nearly two years if the SSD wasn't an important release for you.
  
• Wave 8. Another misfire in the same vein as flotillas: the Onager offering attacks well beyond long range for only one faction only wasn't good for the game (especially at such a low cost that it displaced Imperial Star Destroyers). The Starhawk, specifically with Agate, opened up a points fortress play style that encourages a lot of "is this thing even worth attacking?" kind of considerations that generally feel out of place in a minis war game.

I want to be clear that I love Armada despite its warts but the warts bear mentioning because the Fantasy Flight Games that did right by its community all the time and always released and maintained good content simply never existed. Honestly, the Armada community became one of the best overall gaming communities I've ever been in largely despite, not because of, the way FFG treated us. Anyone that came to the game expecting a wildly popular minis game with big prizes and unwavering attention from its publisher was in for a rude awakening and those sorts quickly went elsewhere (typically to X-Wing, the FFG golden child). Those of us who remained helped one another, we built communities together, we proselytized, some of us ran blogs or Youtube channels. To be an Armada player was to be someone who just wanted to play with Star Wars plastic spaceships because we certainly weren't in it for the glory; in a roundabout way, mild FFG neglect made us kind to one another and it made us the community we are today.

The real victory was the friends we made along the way. And all those stormtroopers we ate.

FFG's approach to minis games, or "falling in love with a time bomb"
So you may be thinking "that's all well and good, Eric, but what if FFG never got gobbled up by a soulless board-gaming conglomerate that was then itself absorbed into some vulture-capitalist katamari nightmare masquerading as a nerd company and then spun off with enough debt to bankrupt a small country?" An excellent question, conveniently-imagined reader! I contend that FFG miniatures games have fatal flaws that make them prone to failing and we'd be looking down the barrel of cancellation roundabout this time regardless. Far from finding this discouraging, I honestly think it makes the AMG situation an easier pill to swallow: Armada was a fun game but it wasn't ever going to last forever and I'm grateful for the time I got with it.

Please forgive what may seem at a casual glance to be negativity about FFG minis game design coming up ahead. I want to be clear that FFG brought several popular minis games to market over a period of about a decade from a company that previously had no miniature gaming experience (Imperial Assault being mostly a dungeon crawler and only somewhat a minis game); FFG's unique approach to minis gaming combined with a strong intellectual property made them fantastically successful for a time and for good reasons. Most importantly, it created at least one game we love. Everything has trade-offs, however, and many of the elements that made games like Armada and X-Wing successful also made them difficult to maintain.

I've played a fair number of different miniatures games over the course of about 25 years. By my recollection that list includes:

• Warhammer Fantasy Battles
• Warhammer 40K
• Battlefleet Gothic
• Mordheim
• Blood Bowl
  
• Warmachine/Hordes
• Dystopian Wars
  
• Dropzone Commander
• Dropfleet Commander
• Infinity
• Star Wars Legion
• Star Wars Armada

I can say I've got fairly broad experience with different types of miniatures games and different publishers. FFG miniatures games are pretty unique compared to most everything else on the market, both for good and for ill. I'm going to focus on Armada, but many (but not all!) of the following traits are shared by X-Wing and/or Legion as well:

• A learn to play rulebook to get players using the starter box right away accompanied by a rules reference guide that goes over the rules alphabetically in exhaustive detail.
• Pre-painted plastic miniatures.
• A strongly flavored intellectual property with lots of named characters.
  
• Cardboard bases with delineated arcs and line of sight markings as well as other stats.
• Play aide cards for the units you bring to the table as well as upgrade cards that attach to those units and give them additional abilities.
• Specialized maneuver tools or templates that offer different movement paths for different units.
• A host of tokens and other accessories that are used on the unit cards, unit bases, or in the play area (like command tokens, ignition tokens, objective tokens, command dials, etc.).
• Specialized measurement tools to measure attack range.
• Alternating activations.

There are some noted advantages to this approach: the core sets for Armada and X-Wing are easy to get to the table quickly; the ships and supplies assemble quickly and then players use the learn to play book to get a game started within an hour of opening up the box. All the various doodads also mean the game components are doing most of the work of maintaining and communicating the game state: damage cards track damage dealt to ships and randomizing critical effects (when flipped face up), shield dials track shields in various hull zones, cardboard bases establish line of sight zones for ships as well as offering reminders of ships stats, and numerous ship, squadron, objective, and upgrade cards are around to help remind players about special abilities, model stats, and what the objective for the game is. In short: it's a very beginner-friendly style of miniatures game propped up by gobs of physical components. Given FFG is primarily a board gaming company it's unsurprising they brought a board gaming sensibility (i.e. cards and cardboard everywhere) to their miniatures games. Being beginner-friendly is a great trait for a miniatures game to have: you get far fewer players becoming veterans if they never stuck around as newbies. Having played a few beginner-unfriendly minis games in my time (Warmachine/Hordes and Infinity), I can't say I recommend the alternative.

There are, however, disadvantages to FFG's approach and most of them are downsides coupled to all the physical components that assist but are required to play the game. Namely: you can't play a legal game of Armada without all the necessary components: numerous types of cards, maneuver tool(s), damage deck, obstacle tokens, command dials, command tokens, defense tokens, measurement tools, ship bases, shield dials, etc. It's a lot of physical stuff. This presents two serious problems:

1) Updating the game is a nightmare.
Edition updates are a dangerous transition period for every miniatures game, causing a lot of turbulence and casting the future of players' toy soldier collections into doubt. Even when edition updates are successful, there's still a period of discomfort that tends to shake some players loose (typically those already on their way out). Edition updates, however, are frequently necessary: no miniatures game gets every element right and over time flaws become apparent in the rule set that should be addressed. Unfortunately, FFG-style games are extremely difficult to update due to all the physical components that also need to be updated, especially all the information on cards and on model bases. 

Look no further than the difficulty FFG had in updating X-Wing to 2.0 to see what I'm talking about: the game needed an update, old ships needed to become compatible with upgrades released in later waves, etc., but the community had a hard time swallowing $50 per faction upgrade pack to replace the piles of cardboard that became obsolete with the update. Releasing a new edition but not updating the cardboard is even worse: if players need to print out or remember changes to numerous cards and cardboard bases and the like, it quickly becomes a slapdash mess. When and if Armada lived long enough to merit a proper 2.0 (buy one of us old grognards a drink sometime and ask us what we'd do if we were in charge of a 2.0 update, you'll be there a while) the process was going to be rough and everyone involved with making that decision would know that due to how X-Wing's 2.0 rolled out.

2) If you don't update the game, it feels less and less like Star Wars
Updating the game would have been a pain but it was becoming increasingly clear it would eventually be necessary by the end of FFG's tenure. Both because of the age of the game but also because of a very common issue with minis games based on strong IPs: I've come to think of it as the "Glup Shitto" problem. 

This post can be charged with murder in 19 states.

To break it down: early editions of games based on a strong IP with lots of iconic characters (e.g. Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Star Trek, etc.) need to start off strong and they do so by releasing content with their most iconic characters, ships, units, etc. This makes perfect sense: the core elements of a fictional universe are most easily recognizable to a large swathe of consumers and are the types of things fans feel most strongly about and want to play a game with. The first few editions of Armada saw many classic ships like the Imperial Star Destroyer, Corellian Corvette, Nebulon-B Frigate, the Home One, the GR-75 transports, etc., alongside tons of classic squadrons. We also had lots of core characters: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, etc. As we got further into Armada we got more ships that made an appearance in cartoons and books that the population at large was unfamiliar with because the design team had already exhausted all the "good stuff" (except poor Chewbacca, come on guys). X-Wing had the same problem: you can only really dig so deep through content before you start scraping the bottom of the barrel. The problem with early releases being core recognizable content and later releases being "I guess it was in a book" is that the more experience the design team gets, the better later releases will be and the more new mechanics they'll integrate which usually means later releases are better and/or fill important roster gaps so they tend to get used more. A less charitable explanation is developers are pushing power creep to ensure the remaining diehard gamers need to keep buying new releases to be competitive, but let's give FFG the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume it's simply due to natural improvement among the development team (and the play testers, to a lesser degree).

So towards the end of an edition you end up reaching a meta state where you don't see many of the earlier-released core units and characters most people know but instead you end up with fleets/armies mostly composed of Glup Shitto also-ran units and characters most people don't have any meaningful connection to. It doesn't feel good leaving Luke Skywalker and your Home One MC80 at home because it's just better running a Starhawk nobody has ever seen before with a commander who got mentioned in a book almost nobody read. Current and potential player interest tends to decline the further into this cycle you get because there just isn't the same level of appeal once you're deep in the Glup Shitto mines. The end result is a game that ages at a faster pace than equivalent non-IP-driven games but is also harder to rehabilitate.

Edition updates are the best way to circle back around and refurbish outdated core elements but those updates are hard to do with the "pile of cardboard" minis gaming approach favored by FFG. I'm pretty confident that with the bad experience FFG had with the X-Wing 2.0 update, by the time such an edition update would've been necessary FFG would've done the math on our smaller game and just pulled the plug. If you're familiar with FFG's serial shortcomings as a card game manufacturer (FFG has abandoned nearly all of its card games including Netrunner, Legend of the Five Rings, Game of Thrones 2nd edition, Warhammer Conquest, the original Star Wars LCG, and Star Wars Destiny), this shouldn't surprise you. Card and minis games are generally the most profitable in their childhood through middle age and by the time a game starts to wear out, the benefits of proper maintenance are uncertain: new editions produce a lot of uncertainty and a lot of new costs and by that point the customer base has shrunk. Would a new edition create more customers? Might it make the current situation worse? Historically when put to this decision point, FFG chooses to call a game complete and invest the energy that would've gone into maintenance into a new venture. And, to be fair to them, it usually works out for them: Star Wars Unlimited, their new CCG, is very popular despite every card game before being given the axe (exceptions: Marvel Champions, Call of Cthulhu, Lord of the Rings) and Star Wars Legion didn't seem to suffer from FFG unceremoniously abandoning Imperial Assault beforehand.

3) Once the game is unsupported, it ages poorly.
The final twist of the knife here is that not only does FFG's style of minis game design make edition updates much harder but also more desirable than in most other minis games, it makes their games more fragile once they're no longer actively supported. All those components we discussed earlier are needed to properly run a game of Armada but they suffer wear and tear, they can get damaged or lost, etc. Once you have can't replace them, it's very difficult to actually play. Imagine what happens when you can't provide any of the following:

• A maneuver tool.
• A distance/attack range ruler.
  
• A complete damage deck.
  
• Any of the obstacle tokens.
• Any of the squadron or ship tokens (the cardboard bases for the ships).
• Enough Armada dice to roll most attacks within reason. 

You're going to be in trouble is what's going to happen. Now I'm sure there's going to be something of a secondary market for creating some of these but in my experience such remedies are often expensive and/or incomplete methods for addressing the gap left by a central manufacturer. So long as Armada was in production, any of these issues could be easily resolved (if perhaps costly, buying a new core set just for a damage deck or obstacle tokens is painful). When your game requires lots of extra components to work, turning off the supply of those replacement components is a serious threat to that game's long-term health.

What to expect in the places Armada is played

Not how I would have put it but not essentially incorrect.

To cut to the chase: Armada is effectively dead as a semi-popular miniatures wargame. We never made it to X-Wing's level of success but we had that brief peak as the #3 minis game and that's pretty cool. It's not all bad, and I think it bears focused discussion of the three primary venues miniatures games are played.

1) Kitchen tables
Small household communities should be able to keep going until they get bored or until their components suffer enough meaningful attrition. This is the venue Armada is likely to be the most durable in as kitchen table communities are frequently small (usually around 4 people give or take), so they're easy to organize and they are unconcerned with financial considerations that will cause issues for tournaments and game stores. The main difficulty here will be the Balkanization of house rules. Kitchen table communities are infamous for their tendency towards house rules and homebrew units and with no clear central authority any more this is likely to become more pronounced. That's mostly harmless within a specific small community but it presents pronounced difficulties in getting different communities to meaningfully interact with one another. The Armada Legacy project seems to be making a play for the kitchen table communities but it's too early to say if they'll see enough success to provide something approximating a standard rule set for these small outposts of the game.

2) Tournaments and competitive play
So long as a tournament organizer can produce the cash to reserve space for an event and enough people pay to join the event for them to recoup their losses, there's nothing stopping tournament play from continuing. As the player base declines, finding enough people to foot the bill could be a problem but that's not a short-term problem at least. Without FFG/AMG support, running large tournaments could prove difficult to get the resources for in terms of both renting the space (as a company like AMG or FFG has the clout to get space where a random gamer may not) as well as lacking organized play goodies to give out as prizes, although third party vendors can potentially step in to help with that (but the costs will go up for sure). Producing a commonly agreed-upon ruleset will likely prove tricky once AMG officially cuts the game loose after Adepticon in April 2025, although I know the Ion Radio Guys are trying to put something together. I'm not confident it's going to displace the house rule set used in many kitchen table communities; I can easily imagine it's going to butt heads with the Armada Legacy project. Trying to get the fractured kitchen table community to periodically come together under a different ruleset used just for tournaments may be a hard sell.

It should be noted that some other unsupported games, such as Battlefleet Gothic, still have a small presence at larger tournaments such as Adepticon although for many people who attend those events it is their once-a-year "let's dust off the minis and have some fun" shindig. There's nothing wrong with that (actually I think it's pretty rad) but if Armada takes a similar tack I'm imagining the events will be much more casual and likely dispense with a cut-throat tournament set of rules in favor of whatever the local organizer prefers to use, which will likely be some blend of official and house rules.

Folks will still play on Vassal and Tabletop Simulator online and those venues have the distinct advantage that the components can't suffer wear and tear (although personally I find the programs a clunky and unsatisfying replacement for the real thing). Many Vassal players I'm familiar with saw it as practice for tournaments and the like so I'm expecting the traffic will die down as the number of tournaments and tournament players continues to decline, but the game should survive online in a diminished state for quite a while among the diehards.

3) Game stores
I want to preface what I'm going to say with the fact that I worked at a board game store for a bit over a year and I spent nearly a decade working management in a retail environment before that: game stores are still stores and need to turn a profit. Many game store owners get into the business as gamers themselves who want to help the gaming community, I should be clear, but they can't do that if they can't make a living and keep the store open and that requires cash. For now, if there are open tables available I have a hard time imagining any game store would turn down players using the space for just about anything gaming-related, but if and when there's competition for the space, game communities with supported games win. 

The reason is very simple: once available stock is gone, there will never be new inventory to sell to Armada players. At that point, Armada and its associated community is in comparison a worse use of the store's time and space than any comparably-sized community for a supported game because the other communities will purchase items for their game, generating revenue for the store, whereas the Armada community can't. That doesn't mean Armada communities should expect to be chased out of their local game store, of course, but eventually as the Armada community dwindles and some other community rises, the store will give priority to the more vibrant and lucrative community. This is the way that local communities tend to dissolve and in my experience it happens gradually, (players taper off for all kinds of reasons, especially with an unsupported game) then suddenly (the store withdraws dedicated table time from the survivors in favor of a healthier game community).

Both the name of this blog and unfortunately a situation I foresee eventually being common in most game stores.

The aftermath
First of all, you can play Armada as long as you like and are able to. I want to be clear about that in case I wasn't clear enough before. Nobody from AMG is going to show up to your house and toss your models in a dumpster. Nobody from the internet is going to put you in a headlock and break your maneuver tools. I've spent a lot of time covering what happened to our game and why I feel it was unavoidable in some form or another because I find understanding the situation helps to bring acceptance. As I mentioned before, I've been in this situation several times before and I want to counsel those of you who are new to the experience: enjoy what time you have left and then move on to something else.

Warhammer Fantasy Battles players know what I mean.

I've seen both Battlefleet Gothic and Netrunner mentioned as examples of games that survived despite being discontinued. I played both of those games for many years so let me tell you unequivocally: both of those games survived, but that's about the best that can be said, and that's an accomplishment given most unsupported games don't. Both Netrunner and BFG are pale shadows of their former selves and live on mostly in sparse kitchen table communities and the odd event at big conventions. Both game communities also benefit from their previous owning companies having the right to take legal action to destroy the community managing them but choosing not to; this is not something I'm at all confident would be the case with Armada: Disney is not known for "letting things slide" when it comes to their intellectual property, even if licensed out. Both Netrunner and BFG also don't have nearly the same level of component requirements: Netrunner needs cards only and BFG's only big need is ship models on circular bases (3D printing here being much easier than Armada's situation because they don't also need a plastic rectangular base, shield dials, or a cardboard ship token). BFG needs other things, but they're easily-acquired: d6s, a tape measurer, and space terrain that you've always needed to make for yourself. In short, I don't think the situation is really comparable between Armada and either of these games and even if it was somehow, neither of those games is exactly thriving after being dropped.

An instructive example of the usual outcome of cancellation would be Warhammer Fantasy Battles: Warhammer Fantasy was the foundational big miniatures game released by Games Workshop before 40K ever existed and later surpassed it. Warhammer Fantasy single-handedly created fantasy miniatures wargaming as a genre, which set the groundwork for science fiction wargaming later and could fairly be considered the great grandfather of even games like Armada. Warhammer Fantasy was released in 1983 and existed until GW killed it off in 2015, going through 8 editions in that time. In its heyday, it was the most popular minis game in the world and played by tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. It had deep roots and an established community. When Warhammer Fantasy was killed, a few different communities tried to keep it limping along: 9th Age, Kings of War, and the Warhammer Armies Project. None of them succeeded on a meaningful scale. Despite all of its entrenched advantages, Warhammer Fantasy died until Games Workshop brought it back this year with Warhammer: the Old World. In short, Warhammer Fantasy had considerable advantages over Armada in the same situation and it still failed.

The official position of a guy who co-founded the internet's largest Armada blog and kinda-wiki and devoted hundreds of hours to writing for it and maintaining it. Be free.

There's nothing wrong with getting the enjoyment you can from what's left of the game, being content, and moving on with the odd game with old friends thrown in when circumstances permit for old times' sake. Trying to will a dead game into eternal life strains the soul and I don't recommend it. If you're looking for a new spaceships miniatures game, you have a few options:

• Dropfleet Commander. Dropfleet 2nd edition is dropping later this year and if it streamlines the rules as anticipated and can sort out its US distributor issues, it should be in a pretty good spot. It's a fun objective-focused game of submarine warfare in space.
  
• Leviathans: the Great War should be released later this year or early next year and comes with pre-painted flying steampunk ships and is made by the studio that produces Battletech. It looks to be crunchier than Armada but with enough overlap that it may scratch a similar itch. I Kickstarted it, we'll see how it goes.
• Star Trek Into the Unknown should also be released soon and has some overlap with Armada in terms of design team (and playtesters, if rumors are to be believed). Pre-painted minis with lots of cards makes it pretty comparable to Armada in that regard, although I'd imagine you'll have some of the baked-in issues with such an approach that I went over in detail earlier.
  
• Pray to the Chaos Gods that Games Workshop re-releases Battlefleet Gothic. This is the Hail Mary option but GW has been rebooting some of its older games and, with X-Wing and Armada in steep decline, the time is ripe so I wouldn't count it out entirely.
• Star Wars Rebellion + Rise of the Empire expansion. Okay, so this isn't technically a miniatures game but rather a board game but if you're craving big Star Wars fights and iconic ships it's an excellent time.
• To a lesser extent, Star Wars Outer Rim is also a good FFG Star Wars board game but it's "Star Wars adventures in the boonies" and not a grand scale war game.
  

I'm keeping my options open on all of the games I listed except Star Trek (nothing against Star Trek, it just never got its hooks into me). There's also tons of conventional miniature wargames out there which should be less intimidating to someone who has dipped their toes in with Star Wars Armada. Generally I'd recommend looking into what's popular in your area and trying to join an existing community (which means Age of Sigmar and/or 40K will likely be on the list at the very least but possibly many others too).

I'm not quite sure how to wrap this all up given it will likely be the last article I publish here. It's been over 8 years since John and I started up this blog. We put a lot of work into it and it seems to have helped a lot of people in that time, which is something we're proud of. I'm grateful to everyone that went on this journey with us and hopefully you'll find just as much enjoyment with your next hobby project once your time with Armada has come to a close. Good luck.